Discussion (381) ¬

I can sympathize with Joyce here. Well, not so much about the husband and the sauce.

I originally majored in education, before I realized just how long I’d be in debt at that level of pay, and how little respect teachers get. Luckily I took an intro programming course just for giggles, thought it was fun, and decided to switch majors.

To be a teacher is hard – even before the school system gets in your way.
There is a 3 minute Slam Poetry Rant called “What does a teacher make?” It lists the abilities of a great teacher, and says exactly how to respond to Raidah and her ilk.

Koms already posted the transcript of this way down the chat, but I thought everyone should see this.

I’m an elementary teacher. I make a good amount of money. Teachers aren’t usually poor; that’s an outdated stereotype. You just have to not be dumb with budgets. I go on vacations (Florida! Jamaica! Europe!) and eat dinner out often and have a 2012 SUV. I also don’t max out credit cards, drink, buy lots of clothes, or live outside my means.

In fairness, Joyce’s stated intention has been essentially to get her MRS. degree – she doesn’t aspire to more than that, which there’s nothing wrong with, though it’ll be interesting to see if Becky cajoles her into something else.

Yup. Not a good move on her part. Makes herself look bad.
And makes Joyce look even better by inadvertently bringing out one of Joyce’s most appealing traits, her sense of humor about her own wacky neuroses.
Joyce might be better at this game than one would think.

Or is he picking up on the difference between the level of Joyce’s aspirations and his own?
Joyce has been groomed to be the stay at home mom with her life revolving around her husband and kids. The education degree isn’t even to be a teacher, but to be better at teaching her own kids.
Is that what Jacob wants?

No, because at this point, from what we’ve seen, he isn’t really contemplating life with Joyce in the first place, so he wouldn’t have any reason to care about the difference in their aspirations.

Furthermore, Jacob, by all appearances, understands that different people want different things–but the BEST read of Raidah’s words would be that she doesn’t, and that she’s only capable of interpreting others’ lives through her own preferences. Even assuming the belittling words aren’t deliberate (and at this point, we, at least, know that they are), she’s displaying an appalling lack of actual empathy.

in my country, if i work full time, i would make half that (or less, after taxes…) . No wonder why so many professionists leave their careers for a chance to flip burgers half time in some other countries… 🙂

The only reason 50K is ‘low’ is because of the level of student debt that usually comes with getting an education degree–if Joyce’s father does well enough to pay for her education, beyond scholarships/grants (if any), then 50K is actually a fairly solid income (especially if she’s part of a two-income family).

Dorothy: “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, this will get ugly before it gets better… it might not GET better. This might be the beginning of a bitter conflict spanning the rest of our school years. Oh dear, Joyce does not know what she’s getting into… or she DOES know. I don’t know what scares me most.”

Next strip: Joyce and Raidah are having a full on catfight, clawing and screaming, clothing is getting torn, people are placing bets, Joe has materialized to start a cheering section, and Jacob is calmly looking at his menu wondering if his workout regimen will allow for extra cheese.

A beautiful analogy – will you be my friend?
Actually, I wonder if either Joyce or Raidah have the drive of either Montoya (vengeance for his father’s death) or the Dread Pirate Roberts (true love). Both of them are driven, have amazing self-discipline, and an amazing skill set in combat (Montoya isn’t a swords master – he’s a swords WIZARD, and Roberts is better than him).

Joyce has literally no concept of what is or is not a lot of money, because it’s not something she was ever taught to worry about. She knows that people can be poor, but she’s never actually thought about what that means until very recently. She doesn’t seem to have ever realized that Becky’s family seemed to be far worse off financially than hers (from what little we’ve seen), for instance.

Her inherent assumption is that you secure a good husband and a good husband just makes enough money to live off of. If memory serves, the whole reason for her major isn’t to ever actually work as a teacher, it’s simply to make her a more effective mother for raising children, which is her sole duty as a living being on this Earth, as ordained by God.

She’s coming from La Porte. Median HOUSEHOLD income there is 48K. Houses are cheap (We bought our first one for under 60K). 50K is enough to single handedly support a whole FAMILY, and with summers off, so you save $$ on daycare. Plus decent insurance? It IS a decent living in much of Indiana.

Not fabulously wealthy, but house, 2 reasonable cars, and vacations, if you don’t have more than 3 or 4 kids.

And every time she tests the water, she’ll make herself look worse in Jacob’s eyes.
Tearing down Joyce won’t work because Joyce can roll with a lot of punches and laugh at herself. The only area that you can seriously rattle her is her religion, and surely Raidah knows that that would be fatal with Jacob.
Add to that that Joyce is a genuinely nice person who won’t tear others down, so she won’t respond in kind by attacking Raidah. Every attempt by Raidah to make J look bad in Jacob’s eyes will make Joyce look that much better in comparison.

She can make Joyce look wacky and unrealistic. Thing is, due to Sarah. Jacob already knows in detail and has made up his own mind. So yeah, these hijinks could work out for Joyce. I wouldn’t put money on it though.

It’s both–she’s demeaning Joyce’s ambitions in an effort to create a contrast for Jacob–but she’s just displaying her lack of comprehension of how Jacob’s mind works. (As someone raised as an Episcopalian, they drill the “tolerance of differences” angle into you as a kid, HARD, in part because there’s a fairly wide spectrum of practice in the church itself. Jacob’s pretty ‘High’ Church, judging by the segment we saw, but being dismissive of ‘Low Church’ practices is a big no-no.)

Hmmmmm…. I THINK you are wrong. I think Raidah is treating Jacob as a possession to be fought OVER rather than a person with agency of his own to be manipulated. I.e. Jacob’s own choice is not a threat to their relationship – Joyce sniffing around is.

(If my reading is right, that is most likely what will cause Raidah’s little alpha bongo card house come crashing down in the end)

Spot on. Raidah is approaching it as a fight with Joyce over Jacob while Joyce is hoping Jacob will like her more and choose her.
Remember how one of the things Jacob likes about Raidah is that she’s not the jealous type? I think he was mistaken.

I don’t think Jacob’s falling for it.
.
Plus, Joyce’s parry is excellent, she’s not about money and “glamour,” which reflects back on Raidah that *she* is. That’s not a look that will appeal to him either.

But she thinks it does, going by the conversation she had with her friends when they brought up Joyce as competition.
So she’s either misjudged Jacob or he has a shallow side that she’s seen and we haven’t.

Agreed. I’m betting that Raidah has misjudged Jacob.
It’s easy for Raidah to not act jealous when she believes she has no competition. Imagine her surprise when she realized that Jacob actually likes Joyce. She expected him to see J as a foolish ignorant child to be tolerated, whereas he sees J as a person with a kind heart, which i expect is very appealing to him.

Seriously, I’m in education (not yet full-time employed), and I know it’s not like a super high-paying career and is definitely undervalued…but $50k a year is around what my parents each make in their non-teaching jobs? A lot of people I’ve known seem to view a good salary as higher than that, but for me that’s always seemed like a good amount to aim for. Lots of people in important careers don’t make that much.

50k is more than enough for one person where I live, provided they don’t do anything stupid and get into debt.
And if both halves of the pair are working, there should be no issues at all, at least until kids become a major expense.

Depends a lot on where you live. In the small Midwestern town where I live, it’s a reasonably comfortable income for a single person, and enough for a frugal couple. In a big city with a higher cost of living, it’s barely scraping by.

Good points, everyone! It definitely does depend on where you are too. It just sounds like a lot because right now, both members of my newly established household combined make, like… half that. But hey, raises are a thing at least~

Keep in mind, the majority of students these days graduate with fairly hefty debt-loads. That’s the real killer–teaching doesn’t pay what a lot of jobs with comparable levels of pre-req education do. So you end up way in the back.

Now, Joyce is very bright, and her dad is traditional in a lot of the good ways (and there’s actually a few Biblical verses that explicitly call out the practice of usury). It’s quite possible that he’s insisting on making sure they pay her way, after any scholarships or grants she might be getting. That would make her starting salary of $35K essentially pure income–and then add in her living expectations of being a small-town gal, where home prices are a lot lower, and where equity is still possible.

Raidah’s probably from a more urban, upscale background–she’s used to the idea that you DON’T buy a home until you’re in your mid-thirties, because you first have to pay off your MBA or law school debt.

OTOH, if Raidah’s dad owns a law firm, they likely have a good deal more money than the Browns do (who have had up to 4 kids to put through college), which makes it more likely they could easily pay her way.

OTGH, Joyce isn’t really supposed to work as a teacher. She’s supposed to get married to a good provider and home-school their kids. So her salary as a elementary school teacher is mostly irrelevant.

Yeah, but she doesn’t think she has the time for a relationship because Yale and Academics. And whoever she dates next needs to be able to get her to take breaks and put some value in self-care and relaxing, because that’s clearly a weak point for her. They need solid self-esteem as well, and to be able to have an open talk about boundaries and how she sometimes changes them without consulting her partner first, but people who don’t have the same trajectories or attitudes can have successful, solid relationships.

I find it mildly insulting that you say that neither Danny nor Walky were Dorothy’s equal. Both have proven themselves to be quite intelligent (Computer Science is hard, Calculus is the one course with which Walky has had explicit trouble), and Dorothy is shooting for the highest office in the entire country, and one of the most important positions in the entire civilized world. Jacob hasn’t stated any higher aspirations than law school, does that make him Dotty’s inferior, too?

I’m in culinary school right now, and to brag I’m pretty fucking good at it. Does the fact that I’m not shaking hands with Bill Gates and writing $10M checks on the regular make me a lesser person in your eyes despite my skill?

There’s a difference between “no personal ambition” and “no self-direction.” If Danny had genuinely wanted and planned, for himself, a life that would satisfy him, then that life might not have been “ambitious” but could still have shown h had a sense of who himself was and was acting in support of himself.

Instead, he was just following Dorothy, almost by default, and without much questioning or self-awareness.

Whole lot of eighteen-year-olds don’t have themselves figured out yet. That’s part of what college is for. In fact, of the whole cast I’m pretty sure most aren’t there yet. (Even Dorothy, I think, will end up tweaking her path to her goal at least and possibly her goal as a whole as she figures out how best to change society.) And in Danny and Walky’s specific cases, they both have a very specific reason why they don’t have a clear goal – their parents. Danny’s put him down constantly and told him the only way to success was Dorothy’s coattails. Walky’s mother, minimum, put him on the pedestal as the golden child future Lawyer/Doctor regardless of his desires or aptitude, with their treatment of Sal always there to remind him what happens to Disappointments. And I don’t have a lot of hope for Charles to be better in that regard. Both sets of parents put them in boxes the way Joyce was at the start of the comic, and told them they could only ever be This Thing. Not a good environment for self-discovery, exploration, or self-esteem.

Also, like. Not all people are made to go through higher education at the same rate, or even at all. It’s not the only path to success, it’s not the only way to find a fulfilling career or a rigorous training program, and people don’t have to only date in their same post-secondary area. Hell, my mother has a master’s and all-but-dissertation, my father didn’t finish a bachelor’s degree, and they’ve been married twenty six years and both have successful careers.

They’re both trying to brag about how awesome they are and how they’re better for Jacob. Raidah’s doing it by insulting Joyce and making herself look better by contrast and Joyce is being inept, but she’s still showing her ass here. (Metaphorically.)

Nah, I suspect this conversation wouldn’t be all that different if Raidah had someone else she needed to impress for a different reason and Joyce was the most convenient target. I don’t get the impression her worldview leaves a lot of room for live and let live.

I’d hazard a guess Joyce is still in the ‘well of course I want this job because it’s what Good Christian Wives do!’ stage for the most part, but yeah there was never a real choice. (Actually looking forward to having that realization she had with Dorothy in Gender Studies for real, even if we won’t get there until 2036 at earliest.)

There’s this idea in the back of my mind sometimes, that I need to be doing things a “correct” way- making lots of money, doing high-profile important things that change the world, and that since I’m not my life has been a waste.

With me that’s just anxiety talking, but for Raidah it seems to legitimately be her world view. Yikes.

Ohhhh, Raidah. One of those people who goes into law because there’s money there. Don’t know why that surprises me, but it does.

Don’t get me wrong I highly doubt Joyce has thought through her major at all beyond it being something she’s ‘allowed’ as a woman, and there’s no shame in picking a job that pays well, but something about Raidah’s attitude here just feels snooty.

(Also teachers deserve way better than they actually get paid and the devaluing of occupations traditionally held by women is a fucking travesty, but like that goes without saying here.)

Joyce is getting her degree in order to be able to homeschool her children, which definitely makes it a reflection of the culture she was brought up in, and she probably could put more thought into if it’s what she wants.

Still, not liking Raidah here. I’m not thrilled with Joyce either, but Raidah is currently annoying me more.

Yeah, I remember that part, I’m just saying Joyce hasn’t really hit the point where she truly realizes she outgrew that box a long time ago and it was probably never going to fit her quite right. (Joyce would run into the same issues as a parent that make me feel it’s not for me – you can’t expect rationality with young kids, they can be loud and contrary and irritating, and it’s not their fault because they’re ENTIRELY dependent on you because they’re small and don’t know things and haven’t grown their brains completely. Maybe Joyce’ll rise to the occasion of course, but I’m not certain it would be her ideal if she actually thought for a while what it entails. Consider how she reacts to Walky.)

I’m thinking that how she reacts to Walky, someone her own age whom she met only a few weeks ago, and how she might react to either her own kids or kids she might be teaching in the future, are two different things. I don’t really see anything in Joyce as she is now that would make her seem either suited or not suited to teaching or having kids, to be honest.

I mean, I agree with you that she needs to do a lot more thinking about what she really wants to do with her life, and to realize she has choices, and that she doesn’t have to go into teaching or even to get married and have kids if she doesn’t want to, and that her parents and church are wrong to try to force women into these boxes just because they’re women.

I’m just saying that being annoyed with an immature 18-year-old like Walky doesn’t mean that someone might not feel differently about actual children.

Remember this is all sort of beside the point. Joyce’s plan isn’t actually to go into teaching. Well, it’s not really her plan at all, but the one that’s been laid out for her. She’s supposed to find a good husband who will support her, have a bunch of kids and use that basic training in education to home school them.

I suspect this plan isn’t going to actually happen and that at some point she’ll realize that and start thinking about what she wants.

I foresee her either being the personal retainer for wealthy scumbags or a corporate lawyer who insists that whatever blatant violation caused a suit wasn’t foreseeable, and an object of internet hatred on par with Martin Shkreli either way. (In fairness, I can also see personal injury lawyer and I know some perfectly reasonable ones of those. Especially since I recall she has family in the legal profession already.)

*the TV is playing an old Benny Hill Show clip*
HUSBAND (who thinks he’s being cheated on): The SAUCE!
(Benny [as a waiter who knows little English] sets a bottle of Worcestershire on the table in front of the husband.)
HUSBAND: The BLOODY SAUCE!
(Benny sets out a bottle of BBQ sauce.)

You can tell someone to back off your SO without throwing an entire career under the bus on the grounds it doesn’t pay well, after all. That one’s all Raidah and her personal brand of Mean Girl bullshit.

Like ‘Jacob hears Raidah denigrate a job that’s necessary for society to function because it’s underpaid’ is that much better?

Cause she is really not coming off well here, and Jacob seems to notice. Again, Raidah could just as easily gone for something slightly backhanded but deniable like ‘You don’t strike me as the type!’, maybe gone into how demanding teaching is or how difficult working with young children must be and is Joyce sure that’s the path she wants and it would barely register as catty without tone. She did not. She went for the low, classist blow, because Raidah has a marked shitty streak there. (We see it with Sarah, we see it with ‘Jacob wants success like me and I can take him places and this freshman child will not bring him that’, we see it with her telling Char not to use the r word but not batting an eye to use special in the same exact sense to Dina’s face. Raidah’s all about the appearance of respectability but cares very little about actually being respectful.)

“respectability” and “respectful” have very little in common with other, besides a handful of letters. Never do.

It’s definitely her classist streak. She thinks Jacob wants the same thing she does and she’s pointing out that Joyce doesn’t share that ambition. Which Joyce reinforces with the focus on husband/romance.

someone “hitting on” your SO is a problem only if your SO responds in kind. If your SO decides they’d rather be with someone else, you have an SO problem, not a “girl hitting on my bf” problem.
“Fighting over” someone overlooks that a person has their own agency and are not a prize for the victor. If Raidah wants Jacob to continue being with her she should work on being the kind of person Jacob wants to be with. Hostility towards Joyce is not something Jacob will find appealing.

In the one piece of fairness I will give Raidah, the one who used the slur was her friend. (Can’t remember if it was Chan or Char, not interested in triggering myself to look it up.) And when said friend said it, Raidah was one of the ones who went ‘too far, don’t use that word.’

She immediately squandered that goodwill by calling Dina ‘special’,* which euphemism treadmilled itself to mean the same exact thing but is currently socially acceptable. Generally speaking, those of us who it targets feel exactly as condescended to and insulted but without the raw hurt the slur creates.

* If you don’t get it, the ‘special’ refers to special education, which in the US is reserved for people with intellectual/learning/developmental disabilities and definitely has a stigma attached. Isn’t ableism fun?

Same and same. Actually dropped a class after a teacher used it (in very clearly That Sense) to describe other classmates. This after said teacher used the r slur to refer to them and I sent her an email saying ‘hey that word’s a slur against my community and I find it really hurtful’ and she apologized. Euphemism treadmill and not treating the attitude underlying the slur at work. (One of those reasons why I’m like ‘let’s not focus on eliminating crazy or stupid from the lexicon entirely guys, they’ll just get more words to use instead and they’ll be worse.’)

If we eliminate crazy from the lexicon, there go half my self-deprecating jokes about my mental health issues. I’d hate to be in a “that’s Our word” situation. Not that I’d fight it if it were clear that I was in a definite minority of the chronically mentally ill.

Also true. (It’s also one of those things I struggle with because like I get being hurt by a word that was used on you before, but at the same time some of them have lost most of the sting and I doubt we can dump them all entirely. Hell, some of the words that used to be clinical are so outdated in that sense people don’t know the original context. And like then you get into things like how 97% of the LGBT community’s lexicon started as slurs, perjoratives or pathologizations and successful widespread reclamation clearly is possible… Don’t call people with the name of a disorder unless they actually have it, and don’t use it as an insult. Don’t use the r word, it’s been too loaded for too long. But crazy? I’m not gonna fight the neurotypicals for crazy. I am especially not gonna fight them for crazy if it keeps them from using clinical terms as insults even more than people do already.)

The other piece if fairness is that Dina, especially that early on, did come across as young, both from her looks and her words and actions. Her first thought was that Dina was in middle school, which isn’t completely unreasonable. Others have done so and Dina was doing her usual completely out of context babble about dinosaurs thing.
When told she was their age, she switched to “mentally challenged” (I don’t think she used “special”. Not in that scene at least.)

Yeah, that term’s not any better, and Dina is clearly sensitive to infantilization – she doesn’t mind an honest mistake too much, but if you continue treating her like that once you know, she isn’t happy.

If Radiah needs to get that defensive about Joyce hitting on Jacob, maybe Jacob and Radiah aren’t meant to be. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Joyce flirting with Jacob, it’s not like he’s married. If someone flirted with my fiance and they fell for each other, then obviously it wasn’t meant to be.

Looks like Raidah is so overconfident she never asked herself what other people consider as decent social behavior.
Starting a conversation with someone under the pretense of wanting to get to know them and trashing the first thing they say?
Belittling someone because the aim for a job that is not severely high-paying?
It really looks like the idea that this could be considered seriously shitty behavior never crossed her mind. The friends she keeps would do the same from what we saw, so she doesn’t know she should be more subtle for this to not be obviously just as shitty as it is.

Which makes her an arrogant asshole but not a very competent one. If Sarah had been a more outgoing, more social person, Raidah hate-campaign probably would have fallen flat. But Sarah, who dislikes and distrusts people anyway, was an easy target to go after.

Which reminds me, Joyce asking why Raidah dislikes Sarah so much she makes a public spectacle of if would be the most aggressive and Raidah-damaging thing Joyce could do without looking like a cat.

I think Raidah acts shitty to people she dislikes or is angry at when she thinks she can get away with it. She knew Sarah had no friends to back her up, so she thought she could get away with being an asshole to her because, she thinks, others would agree with her. She thinks that Joyce is just a Little homeschooled powerless nobody. I mean, others such as Billie and Joe put her down regularly, and Raidah probably thinks that there will be no repercussions if she’s mean to her.

Really, what does she say that’s so bad? She even says it’s a “noble profession.” Isn’t she just admiring the sacrifices Joyce is willing to make?

Snark aside, that’s not an unreasonable interpretation, if we didn’t already know Raidah and what she’s up to. It’s still unclear how Jacob’s reacting. He’s likely predisposed to put a good spin on his girlfriend’s words.

Yknow raidah and Jacob probably wouldn’t last tbh. He doesn’t know her that well (it’s only been two weeks I think), he hasn’t seen how shitty her personality is. Either way I feel like she’d end up making backhanded shitty remarks about his friends, like Joyce whether or not she was persuing him, assuming he’d agree and he’d leave her because of how negative she is

Okay, Raidah not liking Joyce for some of her prior actions whenever they’ve shared a scene? Understandable.

Mocking someone going into education with the vein of ‘lolyurpoor’ earns an immediate ‘screw you’ response from me. My mom’s a teacher. They deserve so much more. There’s room to talk to Joyce about reconsidering her major given her prior history, but mockery because of salary? You’re going to live an emotionally damage life, Raidah. (And that’s something I’ve seen already–sibling went into medicine because of the paycheck. Sibling mental health is really, really bad)

Radish is definitely a shitty person, but I think she’s smart enough not to disparage a member of Jacob’s family that she’d be aware of.
And she implied to be aware of his family because she said he needs her to live up o his family’s standards, hence why Joyce isn’t a threat.

Jacob’s brother is definitely a success by Raidah’s standards: “Your brother didn’t get to where he is by fooling around, did he?”

Also there’s “I know what Jacob wants and it’s to live up to the standards of his family. To make them proud.” Which is not clear about about his parents’ professions but is clear about their aspirations.

It’s the implication that anyone in education is beneath her that prompted the knee-jerk reaction. The implication that anyone that does not go for a job with a ridiculous salary is a moron or unworthy. That is what makes her toxic.

Like I said, there are plenty of reasons for her to not like Joyce. This is not one of them.

Oh yeah. If Raidah were commenting on anything else – you don’t strike me as the type!, even, with a backhanded vibe, or bringing up the mall incident – I would say she has something resembling a point.

This, though? Classist as shit, which is a problem we know Raidah had already, and devaluing a profession that deserves better at that. (And while I have nothing against lawyers, my bet is she’s planning on going into one of the more lucrative but soul-selling fields.)

Like, a lawyer that defends or prosecute whistleblowers? The entire concept of whistleblowing still thrashes the corners of my mind. It’s a human decency thing, and I always get a little shocked when I see how deep the hole is.

My first bet is personal injury, since someone in her family has a firm and I’m certain she intends to use that.

But I could see a lot of options here. Hell, she could surprise me tomorrow and say she’s going for civil rights and Constitutional Law. (Not a lot of money there since there aren’t a lot of job openings, but it has glamor and Raidah has to realize she has a personal stake in matters, she can’t be that blinded by class privilege.)

Regalli, I have kind of an off-topic question—what about the mall incident would lead someone to believe that teaching might not be the best profession for Joyce? I don’t remember anything she did wrong there. Sarah was the one who slapped Raidah. Joyce sort of blamed herself after the fact, but she was way off base to do so, I thought. Even Billie said that it wasn’t Joyce’s fault, and she is usually very quick to criticize Joyce.

No problem, I was unclear. I don’t think the mall incident reflects anything on Joyce and teaching, but Raidah could have used it to try and paint Joyce and the people she hangs out with in a worse light – she probably hasn’t because explaining the source of the feud with Sarah would follow, and there’s a chance Jacob could end up asking questions there, particularly since Joyce knows Sarah’s side of the story, but it’s still an option.

Seriously. I almost went into Social Work, which is likewise poorly paid for the amount of work and education required, but, it still pays whole lot better than what I was doing before (circus performer). From there, everything is ‘up’. It’s always so weird that somebody would make fun of anyone’s steady paycheque.

Sure. I was mainly a stilt-dancer. Event entertainment, and occasional shows. It was as rad as it was stressful.
The recession and mental illnesses killed our outfit eventually, but, it was really fun and exciting while it lasted.
Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do crazy stuff.

It does depend wildly on where you’re living – I’d have to look up what it costs to live in Indiana, but in some places teaching is a legitimately poverty-line career. Still, it’s far from the worst paying job and it usually comes with benefits, those are both huge.

I live in Oklahoma and I have a friend who is a teacher with a Master’s degree who is basically constantly teetering on the edge because Oklahoma pays public school teachers so poorly. Some day we’ll get it right.

I also live in Oklahoma and can concur. In fact, it is a well known issue that Oklahoma’s teachers are paid so poorly that many of our teachers are leaving the state to pursue better paying jobs elsewhere, leaving a shortage of teachers in-state in many areas.

Feature not bug. Bad pay means teachers with options leave. Then they will hire people without qualifications because of the teacher shortage. Then they will move everything to private schools for the wealthy and cheap online classes for the rest of the students. This is the future that’s being prepared for us.

Canada pays about the same for a starting teacher – 35 to 45K until they finish their probationary period (at least a year). After that the average goes from 40 to 85K, so a little higher at the higher end of average. Depending where you live, that’s not bad money.

I should’ve put quotation marks. Obviously she’s trying to make nice with her “”””new friend”””” in front of Jake, so the blatantly disrespectful comments are an odd choice. She’s either misjudged his level of materialism or his tolerance for bullshit.

So long story short, I was kinda torn on the entire situation, because I love Joyce and she and Jacob DO go well together, but I didn’t like that Joyce was being underhanded about it. She should have been honest about her crush from the start. Guess we can thank Sarah for that.

But fuck Raidah for talking shit about Joyce’s aspirations because the salary isn’t up to Raidah’s “standards,” and fuck her for doing it implicitly as a way to smear her in front of Jacob.

For example, average rent where I live is around 1500 dollars a month. Food is another 300-750 dollars a month. The electricity bill and water bill are each about 100 dollars a month. Gas for getting to and from employement is anywhere from 150 to 300 dollars a month. Total living expenses minimum for a single person is about 2100 dollars a month. Inflation is ridiculous.

You also have to keep in mind that most of the places where 4100 a month is enough to pay for an apartment, basic bills, and food, much less children, you won’t actually be paid that much without something like ten years’ experience and the unemployment rate is likely extremely high so the chances of getting hired and keeping your job ten years (rather than being fired for someone cheaper) will be very low.

Many teachers in the US effectively get minimum wage or less and have to work second jobs.

Unfortunately in the US, everything is also very expensive. Food, electricity, water, rent, possibly loan payments, medicine, etc. The actually poverty line in the US is however closer to around 15k a year. However, certain areas have much higher costs of living, so below 30k a year is considered lower class. But if you want children in the US, you better pray you and your partner are netting 50k or more a year or it will not be affordable. It actually costs (on average) 35k just to give birth in the US because of how the hospital and medical systems work. The result is that upper class US citizens, which Raidah appears to come from, view anything below 70k a year as living in squalor. It is isn’t true, but it is a preconception of Raidah’s economic demographic.

I’d just like to reiterate that COL differs widely from country to country. Like, a LOT. Also, besides not taking into consideration COL, you’re also not taking taxes into consideration. Perhaps take really obvious aspects into consideration before jumping to being offended, but I understand you wanted to make a generalization that made you feel good.

$50,000 isn’t poverty, I make 1/2 that, but the cost for things here in the U.S. is often quite a bit higher than other countries. Plus the rent in the big cities Portland, New York, San Francisco can run 3000+ a month, Most other cities run about 700 – 1000 a month. (these are the avg. not high end)

So basically after you take out rent, food, transportation, taxes and any basic necessities that $50,000 doesn’t look so hot. And in some places it would be a hard scrape.

That’s actually the exact subtext of this strip, that Raidah is being extremely insulting by calling that “practically poverty”. But it’s in a way that goes totally over Joyce’s head, because the two of them have different lifestyle standards.

Well, also because Joyce has no idea what anything costs and has had the expectation hammered into her that she’ll find a husband who will provide for her, so she just needs to learn to home school her kids.

I feel like you are looking at an amount of money as absolute when the truth is that a number value for income is meaningless without knowing cost of living and cost of luxuries (to determine the ‘spending power’ of that money). Also Raidah said “You start way lower” so she is likely referring to around 30k maybe? in a some places in america that’s not enough to live, and in expensive places like New York city that’s not even enough to rent a 1 bedroom apartment (which would cost $35472 on average before even looking at electricity, food, and other costs).

Frankly fuck you for saying fuck you to people who are struggling to make ends meet just because the numerical amount of money they earn would be “lot for [your] country.” It’s not here (Well, it depends on which state and which Reagan of a given state).

~$33K looks like average starting salary for public school elementary teachers in Indiana.
Relatively better than in NYC of course, but not exactly comfortable. Assuming you can get a full time job straight up, rather than substitute teaching. Also assuming you don’t start in some private school – mostly much lower wages, except for maybe the really exclusive ones.

Everyone else is right on and has covered a lot of what’s wrong with that line of thinking, so I’ll just say oppression olympics help no one. 50k is still a low salary for the level of bullshit teachers go through, even if some other jobs make less.

Very place dependent. In San Francisco, $250,000 gets you an apartment. In Madison Wisconsin (state capital, major university), it gets you a small, older house. Where I live my son looked for houses in that range and one of them had an in ground swimming pool. They chose a 4 bedroom, three car garage, granite countertop kitchen place in a nice subdivision just outside town with wildlife in the backyard. Two teacher can get a nice place here, but struggle mightily in larger cities or in places that are trying to strangle public schools.

Up to this point I’d pegged Raidah as just being on the bad end of a miscommunication/misunderstanding (over the Suicidal Roomate thing), but this is moving into Catty bongo territory. -5 reputation with Strawberry.

Or when she told Sarah to die in her first appearance. Or when she spent a year scaring off anyone from ever befriending Sarah. Or when she pulled this same classist elitist bullshit *before* when talking about how Joyce was not a threat. Seriously, raidahs always been horrible

I can forgive her “bongo”-ness towards Sarah personally, because if I remember the backstory right Sarah’s old roommate never told the rest of the group the reality of the situation. From Raidah’s perspective Sarah got her friend kicked out of school just to get a room to herself. It’s wrong as hell, but I don’t fault Raidah for her reactions when she doesn’t have crucial information on the subject.

Her dislike of Sarah could be overlooked if most of their interactions didn’t start with her specifically going up to Sarah to start shit. The lunchroom twice and then once at the mall all had Sarah just trying to live and then Raidah approached her to be awful

I agree with everyone above that whether or not $50,000/year is a little or a lot of money depends on many factors, such as (1) where you live (2) how much student loan debt you have to pay off (3) personal circumstances like whether or not you’re supporting a family or have to live alone (i.e., without roomates) for various reasons, etc.

Depending on where Joyce wants to teach elementary school, she may also have to get a Master’s degree if she wants to teach public school. It varies from state to state; NY state, where I live, requires all public K-12 teachers to have a Master’s and take the certification exam. (However, this doesn’t necessarily apply to private and charter school.) So she *might* run up debt that would make $50,000/year or less seem like “not a lot.”

IMHO, Joyce and Raidah are both garbage people at the moment. Joyce is openly going after a guy she *knows* is in a relationship (and doing so in front of his girlfriend!) and has already telegraphed her intentions to Raidah through that exchange of facial expressions a few strips ago. Raidah is being plain rude and snarky. If she *honestly* wanted to start a conversation about how badly teachers are paid, she would have said something like, “I hear teachers have it really rough. What made you choose that career?”

I am giving Jacob the benefit of the doubt – that he’s actually clueless about everything going on at the table. However, if my partner said anything close to that rude to a friend of mine, I would right away tell him to step off.

It seems to me like Dorothy is the only really redeeming person in this situation – although I suppose you could say that she should have excused herself to keep from participating in this whole mess, or pulled Joyce aside (“Joyce, come to the bathroom with me!”) and suggested that Joyce should cool it. However, that is easy to say from the outside when Joyce is her friend and Dorothy is visibly getting more and more uncomfortable with everything going on.

(It’s also easy for me to say as someone who hasn’t been a teenager for quite a while. Today, I’d just get up and leave instead a situation like this instead of continuing to witness/maybe get drawn into the drama. I probably wouldn’t have when I was 18.)

I mean, 50 grand might not be high-paying lawyer money like Raidah’s expecting to make, but it’s still a pretty respectable income. Most people make a lot less than that per year. Looking it up, if you earn more than $30,000 that puts you in the top 50% of income. I mean, the larger point is that you shouldn’t be derisive towards people’s incomes in the first place, but $50,000 is considered a lot by most people.

That’s $50K average. As Raidah says, starting is much lower. $50K also likely requires a Master’s degree.
Being barely in the top 50% with an advanced degree isn’t actually that great. It’s a lot of work to get there.

$30K puts you in the top 50%, $50K is actually top 30%. My point was 50k (the specific amount mentioned) is well above what half of people make on average in America, and therefore most people would consider it a lot, because it’s more than what they make and is generally pretty well above the official poverty line. The greater issue in all of that is the great wealth disparity, with a select few making ridiculous amounts of money and everyone else making much lower than they probably should for the work they do.

We run LEGO programs here, as do many libraries. Yes, they are messy to pick up, but a good start on STEAM. Libraries can be as bad as schools. Small one don’t require degrees, but most requite an MA for entry level.

Yep, Raidah’s a snob. Still, everyone has their own standards of what constitutes happy. If being rich and powerful is hers then so be it. That aside, Jacob at last seems to be getting a hint of the nuances here, based on his expression in panel 4!

Oh, and Joyce? I’m drawing a red line here: I don’t want to know what you want to do with all that Arby’s sauce!

It isn’t Raidah’s talk of success that might be bothering him, it’s Raidah using it to imply that Joyce is her inferior. He strikes me as the sort of person who would feel uncomfortable with such categorisation based on those criteria.

I honestly don’t see Jacob as looking surprised at Raidah here. He’s not even looking at her at all and he still has his arm around her. I think he’s looking more surprised at Joyce proudly saying 50K is a lot of money.

I mean, 50K isn’t a bad salary, depending on where you live, but I think most people tend to consider 70K+ ‘a lot’. 50K is nicely in the middle (which, again, not a bad thing).

Yeah, here median is 21 k$. And housing is much much pricer. Si the rest comes all from the cost of private health and insurance or is it pure consumerism? Wait I get some of it, in fact the median income is around 28k but in it are included universal medical and health care, universal social and health insurance, free education with small fees in universities, and so on…

My yearly salary after taxes and housing benefits is about $12000 American. That’s not living in poverty, Raidah. Heck, with Joyce’s starting salary I could have all the clothes, healthy food and videogames I’d want and still put away enough to buy a house with cash within ten years. A nice one, with solar panels and a potato patch.

Yeah, but you’re not living in America. You couldn’t “have all the clothes, healthy food and videogames I’d want and still put away enough to buy a house with cash within ten years” on that salary in the US.
Money is relative.

Would that be after you’d paid off the debt from your Master’s Degree? And you wouldn’t be starting at $50K – closer to $35.
I’m not sure if the Master’s is required in Indiana (Some states require it to teach, others require you to get it within a certain number of years, others, I think do not require it at all.) It generally links to a salary boost though.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Raidah manages to quite effectively persuade Jacob that she’s toxic and that he doesn’t want anything to do with her. Sarah will probably reflect on the irony was that all she needed to do was invite Raidah to be herself in front of Jacob to ruin their relationship.

The fact that Raidah would have effectively self-destructed the relationship won’t stop her from persecuting Joyce. I also suspect that Joyce’s friendship with Dorothy will be strained to say the least because I don’t think Dorothy would approve of such a conniving plot on her part.

As was said earlier on in this storyline this is looking more and more like a bad rom com in that Joyce is the good one that everyone roots for because shes just so gosh darned nice and she has such great chemistry with the male lead (sorry Jacob) who somehow fails to see, at first, how great Joyce is and how mean and nasty his current girlfriend is

The current girlfriend of course has to be mean and nasty so we’ll support Joyce taking Jacob because Raidah doesn’t deserve him and eventually Jacob will come to see he and Joyce are a perfect match and, after a silly misunderstanding, will go rushing after Joyce, they’ll kiss and they’ll both live happily ever after and Raidah will never be mentioned again

So yeah I think this is also the authors take Jotce being overly influenced by Disney and bad rom com

God, Raidah is such an asshole that I definitely want Jacob to dump her and find someone better. She IS a classist patronizing bully, you’re totally right. I hope she goes through some character development.

She’s saying it’s noble but the implication of the rest is that it’s pathetic. The implication i get is that she doesn’t value nobility and thus thinks becoming a teacher is a naive/cute/quaint decision when you could’ve chosen ‘glamour’

I know it isn’t a life of fame and glory but teachers make solid professional salaries and receive above average benefits. The benefits side is changing for teachers but they are still far superior to benefits at an average private company job.

Even from the perspective of a cynical realist, I think the point goes to Joyce on this one. (Unless I am way off about Raidah and she is majoring in engineering or computer science or nursing or accounting.)

Yeah, but she’s going into law. Which you don’t really do with an elementary education major. Sure, her immediate major might not actually do better, but her plan definitely does.
Joyce’s doesn’t. It doesn’t really lead anywhere.

In my scant experience with prelaw students, they don’t see themselves as humanities majors. It’s a disgrace they tolerate until they become lawyers and then eat babies or whatever it is lawyers actually do

Law schools do not care what your major is. They only care about GPA and LSAT score, it’s easily the most numbers-conscious profession, much more so than even doctors.

Law is also a really oversaturated field at the moment so unless Raidah scores high enough to get into a Top 14 school she might end up making less than Joyce. The legal profession in general is absolutely obsessed with academic pedigree and it’s very hard to get your foot in the door if you didn’t graduate from a high tier school.

I note that Raidah and Billie share a lot of characteristics. Money as a solution. Leader of a group of mean girls in HS that they plan to carry over to college. Their contrasts are what make it interesting. Billie has no real plans for the future, while Raidah is going for the money. Billie has enough money to not care about it, while Raidah is ambitious. Billie is starting to care about someone besides herself, while Raidah is all about herself and accessories (like Jacob and her posse).

Joyce is certainly not without blemish here, but there are about a billion better ways to deal with someone else hitting on your partner* than mocking someone’s career ambitions because the job isn’t prestigious or high-paying enough for your liking. I’m sure nothing will make you look better to your boyfriend than looking down at Joyce for studying a thankless profession that’s necessary for society to function, Raidah.

*First of which I’d think would be to either pull your partner aside and talk to them or behave politely through the meal and bring up your concerns after, because your partner is in fact a human being with sentience and not a piece of meat for you to fight over.

I wonder if Raidah knows she’s being a dick. I remember Dina saying about her “She was not kind to me, though I imagine she thought she was.” but I feel like you have to be trying to get to this level of dickishness right? No one could have their head this stuck up their ass by accident?

With Dina, she thought she was trying to be nice by telling her friends not to be mean and trying to warn her off Sarah – though, because she thought Dina was cognitively disabled, she was THE MOST condescending person possible.

And she may be right, to an extent.
It’s not likely to make Jacob think less of Joyce, but it might make him more resistant to thinking of her as a potential romantic partner – which he isn’t even consciously doing yet.

Yes Raidah. Degrade Joyce’s ambitions, insult your boyfriend’s friend and one of the most important and under appreciated careers out there. Insult the poor, pull more of your classist bullshit. Show Jacob your true colours, let him see what an arrogant, classist, elitist bongo you are.

We all know Joyce overreacted at that time, even she knows.
You think it’s a good idea for her to take Raidah as a role model and overreact more?
There is a hard to translate German saying
“Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft”
More or less “jelousy is a fervor which favourosly searches for that which creates agony”. It sounds better in German because of the double play on words, but the inability to translate that doesn’t make it less fitting.

She’s not going into teaching as a profession, she’s been pushed to education so she can fulfill her god decreed role as a mother and homeschool her children to keep them safe from the evils of secular childhood education.

The combination of telling Joyce she’ll essentially start with living in poverty, and “we can’t /ALL/ live glamorous lives”, makes me really think Raidah is the type of person that think that poverty is a natural thing in society and not really worth trying to fight.

She’s the kind that tells fastfood workers that if they want better pay they get a better job, instead of thinking that all jobs should provide a decent pay for the time spent working.

I love pre-major students who talk a bunch of junk because they think they are amazing. Like you haven’t even started the bulk of what you are going to learn yet? I know a number of premeds who were so arrogant only to not make it to med school, or be ridiculously miserable during med school because it’s not what they expected.

And plus, law isn’t even that lucrative. There’s a glut of lawyers. I went to a pretty decent school and a lot of the people I went with make $50-$60k and have a crap ton of debt and work horrendous hours. People think it’s a license to print money but it’s not

$50k/year sounds like a blissful dream to me. I’ve made under $15k/year for my entire working life. And that has included teaching positions. Screw Raidah. People who look down on those who dedicate their lives to professions that mean more than how much money they earn really make my skin crawl.

Ooooh, Raidah’s passive-aggression really grinds my gears here. But then again, dirty lens. (I’m a teacher, but not elementary. And honestly? They should get paid more than us HS teachers. Their job is more important and impactful, since the kids are younger.)

Also, yeah, teachers are way underpaid to “eh, middle class?” in the US depending on which state you live in.